The Art of Character Association

Disclaimer:

Most of the projects that I will be doing are for a game that I am developing on my own code named Project Ninjio. In short, the game is a story action driven role playing game (common referred to as an action RPG). It features 2 uniquely styled areas, one in which the cities are built to flow along with nature, and the other where the cites are hyper futuristic. The game is set in a futuristic China, where after a large war, the country is split into the two settings described above. The game is built in the Unity 3D game engine.

The Art of Character Association

Introduction

One thing that I have been having issues with in Ninjio is how to have players memorize and associate the names of the characters to their personalities and such. This is hard because I am adamant in keeping the original Chinese names unaltered in the final game, even though they are fairly difficult to pronounce correctly. I have toyed around with some ideas and have came up with a few methods for getting the name to image association correct in players minds.

How to be memerible, the right way

Borderland's style of character introduction

One thing that I found common in many video games, like Telltale Game's Borderlands series, is a way of quickly giving off some sort of information about the character along with some sort of memorable line that the character either says a lot or they center actions around. Borderlands does this in a very obtrusive way, with the game pausing, zooming in the character, the character saying some sort of silly voice line, and then the game displays their name along with a line that the character typically uses as their motto for their actions in the game.

Another method that I saw a lot in other video games to display character information is to have a screen that the players can access at any point in the game. Games that use this method typically just display factual information like the character's age, height, width, attack information, and any other information that the player may find useful. While this can display lots of factual information, I only know a few games that use this style of display to show character personality information, however I plan on using and displaying this information differently in Ninjio.

Character profiles in Ninjio

What I am planning for Ninjio's character profiles is a hybrid between the two methods that I outlined above. I plan on taking the memorable lines, the character portraits and the silly voice lines that Borderlands has and combining them with some other information about the character's personality or history (see sketch). These profiles will only be available for the player for the 7 main characters that the player will be interacting with throughout the story.

Incentivizing? I think so!

Incentivizing the player to view these profiles

As the game is currently written, the player (playing as the main character of course) meets the villain early into the story and the main character's mentor very early into the storyline. I think that it would be appropriate for the player to then be prompted, hopefully in a manner that seems natural to the player, to open up the character profiles for the main character, the villain, and the main character's mentor. As for the rest of the cast, including Bing Nu, I have a scene where the main character is required to go around and introduce himself to the rest of the cast (minus one!). I think that when the players introduce themselves to these characters, their profiles unlock in the character profile menu. The last character, I will just wait until he hacks into his own profile to unlock it.

This week's work log:

Monday November 6th: Made a run cycle for Bing Nu

Tuesday November 7th: Made a valiant attempt to get the foot IK working, which ultimately failed

Wednesday November 8th: Worked more on foot IK and it seems to work well

Thursday November 9th: Started work on one of the weapons, the Omega Blaster

Friday November 10th: finished modeling the Omega Blaster, ultimately got rid of it for various reasons

--. -. .. --.. .. .-.. .- .. - .. -. ..     .-.. --- -.-. --- - --- .-. .--.     -. --- .. - ... .- -...